This edited collection engages with both identity and specific time-limited notions in performance: textual, embodied, visual, and communal.

Each chapter of Socially Engaged Creative Practice focuses on an individual or group’s mode of working and methodological practice of performance across a range of modes, disciplines, and media, from community opera to online queer performance; from anti-racist classroom pedagogy to 1980s cabaret in nightclubs; from community art projects in schools to community writing projects in transport interchanges. The performers, writers, and creators represented here engage and grapple with contemporary performance as a situated practice and as a problem.

The personal perspective of each performer—as directors, librettists, producers, and writers—is explicitly located in a community, and the book offers a series of case studies detailing socially engaged work that aligns with concepts of performance and community.